Jonathan E. Robbin received his A.B. from Harvard College (1951),
his A.M. from Columbia University with the Cristo Miron-Lovneau Prize (1955)
and pursued graduate studies in sociology, demography, statistics and research
methodology at New York University (1956-1960).

Affiliations in the 1950's

Before embarking on his entrepreneurial career, Mr. Robbin
was a staff member of the Harvard University Laboratory of Social Relations
(1952-1953), a staff member of the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory
of International Business Machines Corporation at Columbia University (1954-1955),
a Research Associate at the Population Council of the Rockefeller Foundation
(1956), and a faculty member of New York University, Department of
Sociology (1957-1961).
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Activities in the 1950's

Computer Programs for Factor and Cluster Analysis

During the 1950's, he developed some of the first computer
software for large-scale multivariate statistical analysis, including systems
to perform factor and hierarchical cluster analysis of data sets with up
to two-hundred variables using the IBM 650 and 7090 computers. Mr.
Robbin also developed a method for iteratively approximating a SIMPLEX
clustering array in which variables or objects were linked (grouped) by
maximizing the secondary diagonal of their correlation matrices (ri,i+1)
through permutation of vectors. These programs were applied to a number
of innovative projects, including:

the ecological classification of Bahamian facies for Dr. John Imbrie, a
geologist at Columbia University (later a MacArthur Fellow),

a
typology of American cities based on 1950 census data and numerous other
projects in sociological aggregate data analysis for Dr. Edgar Borgatta
of New York University and the Russell Sage Foundation,

and computation of very large correlation matrices for Dr. Charles Westoff's
work, "The Third Child," at Princeton University's Office of Population
Research.

Computer Programs for Scientific Applications

At the same time, Mr. Robbin also developed ground-breaking
software in the scientific computing field, including:

the first program for automated design of kinematic linkage mechanisms
for Dr. Ferdinand Freudenstein, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at
Columbia University,

a system for analyzing the vibrations of rocket hulls including the effects
of rotatory inertia and shear deformation for Dr. George Hermann, Professor
of Civil Engineering at Columbia University,

and a numerical solution to the six-pad bearing problem as applied to air-driven
and suspended magnetic drums for Heard Baumeister, then principal investigator
in a number of research projects in mechanical engineering at the Watson
Scientific Computing Laboratory of International Business Machines Corporation
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Entreprenurial Career

Founding of Research Data Processing Corporation

Mr. Robbin began his entrepreneurial career as President and
Chairman of Research Data Processing Corporation (RDPC) which he founded
in 1961.

Founding of General Analytics Corporation

In 1964, Mr. Robbin became President and Chairman of General
Analytics Corporation (GAC), RDPC under a new name. In 1968, GAC
became a publicly held corporation. Subsequently, in 1970, the company
was acquired by the Republic Corporation.

Founding of Claritas Corporation

In 1971, Mr. Robbin repurchased the assets, operating facilities
and business of GAC from Republic and founded Claritas Corporation as a
wholly owned private entity with offices in Bethesda, Maryland. and
was its Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and principal owner from that
year until 1984 when the company was partially sold to VNU Business Information
Systems (VNUBIS), the U.S. subsidiary of Verenigde Nederlandse Uitgeversbedrijven,
a major Dutch publishing concern. From 1984 to 1986, Mr. Robbin was Chairman
and a limited partner in Claritas, L.P.. From 1987 to 1989, he held the
position of Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the current Claritas Corp.,
which replaced the partnership and is wholly owned by VNUBIS.

Founding of Auricom Corporation

In 1989, Mr. Robbin left Claritas to its new owners and in
1990, founded Auricom Corporation with John Anderson, a former partner
at Claritas. Auricom, of which he was Chairman, has a charter of providing
services to companies with significant databases who wish to gain added
revenue through the derivation of new marketing and information products
from their data resources and who desire the most widespread and effective
distribution of these products.

Founding of Ricercar, Incorporated

Mr. Robbin sold his interest in Auricom to Mr. Anderson in
1994 and founded Ricercar, Inc. of which he is Chairman, President and
sole owner. Ricercar provides his individual consulting services along
with those of his professional associates in the performance of contracts
primarily for the building of custom market sizing, targeting, segmentation
and siting models for direct, retail and mass marketers. The company also
designs and develops new analytical, typological, interpretive and predictive
systems supporting marketing and communications, business planning, location
and development, human ecology, household sector and small-area economics,
demography, social geography and epidemiology. The commercial, scientific,
political and educational applications of these systems are packaged by
Ricercar in the form of proprietary software, databases and other
information products and sold to a wide clientele both directly and through
a number of "partner" vendors. In addition, Ricercar is making a major
investment in the building of expert systems for marketing information
and analysis applications that can be used interactively in both Internet
and Intranet environments.
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Activities in the 1960's

Manhattan Journey to Work and Park and Ride Studies

In 1962, Mr. Robbin directed RDPC's first large-scale contract
in statistical data processing for the Penn-Jersey Transportation Agency,
the analysis of a sample of 90,000 commuters into the Manhattan central
business district producing the first automated journey to work study of
New York City (using the IBM 1410 and 7074 computers). This project was
also the first to summarize trip data using postal geography. New York
City 1962 Postal Zones provided the "to" and "from" small areas for a commuter
origin/destination matrix. Metropolitan Postal Zones were the predecessors
of the United States Postal Service's ZIP Codes ("ZIP" is a mnemonic for
"Zone Improvement Plan").

This work was followed by a project for the Tri-state Transportation
Agency (a regional transportation planning operation supported by the state
governments of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut). The Tri-state effort
entailed a forecast of commuter demand for a contemplated new railroad
park and ride stop on the Pennsylvania Railroad's main line, the Jersey
Avenue Station in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Mr. Robbin designed the questionnaire
instruments and sampling procedures, directed data gathering on local and
interstate highways, buses and railroads, oversaw the data processing and
performed the statistical analyses which developed the study's findings.

Advertising Research and Benefit Segmentation Analysis

In the early 1960's, while heading RDPC, Mr. Robbin also directed
many cutting edge projects in advertising and marketing research using
new multivariate statistical programs for clients including Grey Advertising
Agency, Benton and Bowles, Kenyon and Eckhardt, IBM, Pepsico, Lever Brothers,
Ford Motor Company, Merck, Warner Lambert and others. Statistical
models and computer programs for large-scale Q-sort (transpose) factor
analysis and multi-dimensional linear optimization were originated by Mr.
Robbin to support Dr. Russ Haley's implementation of "Benefit Segmentation
Analysis" at Grey. Dr. Haley was the innovator of this powerful new method
of uncovering segments of consumers defined by the benefits they valued
most in specific goods or services and the degree to which the satisfaction
of such benefits by competing products determined ultimate purchase behavior
and market shares. These procedures are still widely and effectively used
in contemporary marketing and advertising research.

Southern California Gas Company Cross-level Study

In 1965, while Chairman of GAC (General Analytics Corporation),
the successor of RDPC., he also directed the design, analysis and implementation
of a marketing information system for the Southern California Gas Company,
a subsidary of Pacific Lighting Service and Supply. In this project,
1960 census tract demographic data were joined to hand-geocoded customer
accounting records, customer surveys and metered household gas-burning
appliances to model and explain local residential consumption of utility
gas and forecast consumer demand for this fuel by small geographic areas.
This was one of the first large-scale marketing research studies to utilize
"cross-level" data analysis - i.e., to merge individual consumer survey
and administrative data with demographic small area context data in a predictive
model.
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Office of Economic Opportunity Contract

The Community Profile Project

In 1966, Mr. Robbin established GAC's Washington, D.C. office
where he directed the development and implementation of the Community Profile
Project for the federal government at the Office of Economic Opportunity
(OEO). This large effort for the lead agency in the "War on Poverty" produced
an 187,000 page report containing natural language narrative descriptions
of the general and poverty-related social, economic, geographic and demographic
characteristics of each of the 3,134 United States counties using updated
1960 census small area summary data merged with 29 other agencies' data.
These reports were designed to report clearly and simply the results of
expert statistical analysis, comparison and interpretation of the data
for immediate consumption and use by lay persons who were charged with
the amelioration of the level of living in their small local constituencies
-- in keeping with the Community Action Program (CAP) initiative of the
OEO to involve local entities in the reduction of poverty.

Bibliography of Federal Statistical Data

A byproduct of this effort included one of the first comprehensive
annotated bibliographies of federal statistical data and information products
for small areas with documentation and metadata at the item level of detail,
organizing and hierarchically cross-referencing over fifteen-thousand variables.

Typology of Poverty Populations

While contractor to the OEO, Mr. Robbin also created a typology
of poverty populations for the agency, including a multivariate "Poverty
Index" for small areas simultaneously measuring several dimensions of poverty
including: its severity (degree of deprivation), concentration (proportion
of population poor) and magnitude (number of poor persons and families).

The Index of Susceptibility to Civil Disorder

In addition, he developed for OEO an "Index of Susceptibility
to Civil Disorder" for American cities, a discriminant classification model
which clearly specified the social and economic antecedents of the 1967
"ghetto riots". The model identified with 87% accuracy the cities in America
that experienced the incidence of riots in their Black neighborhoods in
1967. This rate of correct classification of all cities into "riot/non-riot"
types rose to 93% after several new disturbances occurred in reaction to
Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968.
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Other Developments during the 1960's

The IBM 1130 Computer Statistical System and HCAP

Other projects in statistical systems design completed under
Mr. Robbin's direction at GAC and RDPC in the 1960's included the design
and implementation of the 1130 Statistical System for International Business
Machines Corporation and the development of HCAP, the "Hierarchical Cluster
Analysis Program" for the IBM 7094.

INFORMS

At GAC, Mr. Robbin also conceptualized and oversaw the development
of INFORMS, a general-purpose Information Management System (IMS) running
on the IBM 360 series of computers. INFORMS embodied Mr. Robbin's
conviction that statistical analyses should be totally packaged as expert
systems, eliminating any need for the end-user to understand or apply statistical
methodologies and techniques in order to utilize their results. To this
end, INFORMS incorporated a unique report program generation language
into a powerful proprietary IMS enabling simplified computer production
of narrative texts interpreting the results of statistical analysis and
reporting them to end-users in natural language.

Census Data Access and Use Laboratory Contract

Under GAC's contract with the Data Access and Use Laboratory
of the United States Census Bureau, Mr. Robbin directed the development
of reports utilizing INFORMS technology for evaluation in the 1967
New Haven Census Use Study. The Census Use Study was a pioneering
effort for the testing and refinement of new technologies in the use of
small-area census data. These included the earliest implementations
of geographic base systems and record matching, geocoding and computer
mapping software as well as trials of special tabulations of microdata,
special sample surveys of family health and area travel patterns and systems
for satisfaction of local data user interests and needs. The application
of INFORMS to 1967 New Haven special census data automatically produced
narrative descriptions of all New Haven census tracts which statistically
interpreted and comparatively evaluated tract characteristics in natural
language. The results of this exercise were reported in Census Use Study
No. 5, Data Interests of Local Agencies, published by the Census Bureau
in 1970. Therein, the tract narrative profiles were described as the most
valued and widely used reports of census data of all the alternative forms
presented to non-technical city government personnel in executive administration,
health, public safety, social service, city planning, election, transportation,
maintenance, and waste management operations.
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Activities in the 1970's

Charter of Claritas Corporation

Mr. Robbin organized Claritas in 1971 with the primary purpose
of focusing his company's business on the opportunities for growth he foresaw
in adding value to census data resources at small-area levels for guiding
the planning, execution and evaluation of marketing actions. At that time,
census data were tabulated directly only for arbitrary administrative and
political units of small-area geography such as minor civil divisions,
tracts, block groups and enumeration districts which could be linked to
an individual address only through expensive and approximate data processing
procedures. Thus, the business community made practically no use of local
area census statistics in spite of their vast potential as a market targeting
information resource.

Development of Census Data at the ZIP Code Level

In 1972, however, the Census Bureau also attempted to make
indirect estimates of its tabulations of 1970 data for five-digit postal
ZIP Codes in major metropolitan areas, the "Fifth Count." Through the ZIP
Code, data regarding a neighborhood context could be appended to an individual
address record at no cost whatsoever. Unfortunately, the Fifth Count contained
usable data for only about 4,500 out of the 36,000 ZIP's in the U.S.. One
of the first tasks Mr. Robbin completed at Claritas was the massive job
of reallocating tabulated 1970 census data from its given administrative
and political geographies to all 36,000 five-digit ZIP Code areas. The
resulting database was immediately put to use bydirect marketers, who wanted
to target their mailings to specific ZIP's with high densities of prospects
qualified by census-based socioeconomic indicators predictive of response,
credit or repeat purchase.

Publication of REZIDE and launching of geodemographic market targeting

One-hundred-and-twenty-one selected characteristics of U.S.
five-digit ZIP areas drawn from this database were also published by Claritas
in 1974 in a 3,000 page databook, REZIDE, The National Encyclopedia
of REesidential ZIP Code DEmography, designed and
edited by Mr. Robbin. Several new multivariate indices describing small-area
populations were created for REZIDE by Mr. Robbin. These included
ZQ, a T-score for each ZIP measuring socioeconomic status and the Family
Life Cycle Code describing the dominant pattern of household composition
in each ZIP. For the following ten years, this publication and its updates
were the only comprehensive printed source showing the economic and demographic
characteristics of the populations served by each of the nation's 36,000
five-digit ZIP Codes.

Launching of geodemographic market targeting applications

The publication of REZIDE and development of the
comprehensive ZIP Code database of census summary information made generally
available the first comprehensive and practical implement for performing
what he termed "geodemographic" market targeting -- the use of demographic
data summarized for small geographic areas as independent variables explaining
and predicting sales results in the same small areas.

Geodemographic market targeting projects for TIME and other magazines

TIME, Inc. and other print media clients made early and extensive
use of the new ZIP-based data. Systems built by Mr. Robbin supported
their sales of advertising space with circulation profiles geodemographically
linked to product purchase data and with geodemographically created special
editions (such as TIME-Z). Initial geodemographic mail response models
crafted by Mr. Robbin dramatically improved the efficiency of direct promotion
of new subscribers and renewals as well as payment performance.
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Development of the Claritas Neighborhood Lifestyle Cluster System

A major technical innovation produced in 1974 by Mr. Robbin
for Claritas was a system of classification of all U.S. ZIP's, census tracts,
enumeration districts and block groups into forty categories. Each of these
forty types of neighborhood contains areas with similar socioeconomic characteristics
yet is distinctly different overall from the other types.

The quantitative categorization of local population aggregates was first
applied to selected metropolitan areas by the "Chicago School" of human
ecologists and the early social area analysts such as Shevky, Bell, Moore,
Williams and Tryon. Mr. Robbin extended it to a national level through
a multivariate statistical model of his design.

Mr. Robbin began the task of defining a national typology by partitioning
over six-hundred demographic and economic indices derived from 1970 census
small-area summary data into six domains of related content:

A bi-level factor analysis reduced the six-hundred indices to thirty-four
composite measures explaining 84% of the variance between American neighborhoods
over the whole scope of small-area census data. The largest factors extracted
replicated the Shevky, Bell dimensions, thus providing a validation over
time. All of the nation's ZIP Codes were then compared by a modal-seeded,
iterative K-means cluster analysis in the thirty-four dimensional
hyperspace derived through factoring. Hierarchical (Ward's) cluster
analysis was applied to the vectors of orthogonal measures summarized for
each of from twelve to two-hundred cluster solutions in order to reveal
the latent structure of the typology. After evaluation of a number of alternative
models, forty area types were isolated as the most meaningful and statistically
efficient configuration for analysing transactional or sample-survey marketing
data containing customer address information. Each of the United States'
five-digit ZIP Code, minor civil division, census county subdivision, census
tract and block group/enumeration district populations was assigned to
one of the forty types. This work was the first application of factorial
ecology which described and classified neighborhood-sized social areas
on a nationwide scale.

The resulting system of forty small-area types, the Claritas Neighborhood
Lifestyle Clusters, first developed with 1970 census data and updated later
with the 1980 census and exogenous information was a quantum leap forward
in marketing science. It enabled marketers for the first time to
discover rapidly latent groups or segments of customers using only their
address. This system permitted segments with highest sales potential to
be located geographically with great precision for the purpose of efficiently
targeting new prospects. In addition, the characteristics of each segment's
neighborhood context provided a rich description of its members for use
in developing effective and relevant selling messages.

This form of precise, empirically-based, quantitative market segmentation
finally obviated the need for qualitative segments based on highly subjective
small-sample behavioral studies and intuitive guesswork. The incidence
of such "psychographic" segments could not be estimated for small area
populations since their underlying data were not measured by census or
any other geographically detailed systems. Thus, their value could
not be directly evaluated in practice. Occasionally, Claritas had an opportunity
to analyze "psychographic" segments that were assigned to survey respondents
who were geocoded -- i.e., linked to census small area context data through
the relation of their addresses to census geographic codes. Studies of
these linked data unequivocally revealed "psychographic" categories to
be weak or null predictors of aggregate sales when demographic and economic
context data were held constant.

However, the Claritas Neighborhood Lifestyle Cluster system provided
a reliable method of projecting meaningful behavioral data to small areas
by exploiting the strong relationship between individuals' behavior and
their neighborhood contexts. For example, when questionnaire data measuring
product consumption were profiled by Claritas Cluster, the sales potential
of local areas could be estimated in a manner unbiased by prior market
domination or unequal concentrations of distribution, competition and/or
advertising effort. This technique of typological prediction contributed
a new methodology to survey-based marketing research which significantly
incremented its value by extending its use to tactical large-scale marketing
operations such as selective promotion by direct mail, "spot" broadcast
media, special metropolitan editions of national publications and local
delivery zones of newspapers.

Areas of greatest opportunity now could be located by simply ranking
all neighborhoods on the difference between actual and estimated sales
or on an index of sales potential comparing each local area to a national
or regional average. Calculation of a continuous "lift" statistic displayed
the descending cumulative benefit of any level of target selection.
Also, by Cluster profiling syndicated research or broadcast rating respondents,
a linkage was established enabling discovery of the most appropriate and
efficient way to reach qualified segments of prospects through broadcast,
print, outdoor, direct or other measured media.

Use of geodemographic selection in practice unfailingly demonstrated
real and substantial increments in return on marketing investments in application
after application. Conceptual problems which had stunted the investigation
of cross-level (individual/aggregate) methodologies in academic social
research (such as Robinson's "ecological fallacy") were, therefore, relegated
to irrelevancy in the real world of marketing. The Claritas Neighborhood
Lifestyle Cluster system irrefutably demonstrated the benefit of taking
collective actions guided by "ecological" predictions.

Descriptions of the Clusters, including their principle demographic
attributes, buying behaviors and cultural highlights may be obtained from
a book written by Michael Weiss, The Clustering of America (Harper
& Row, N.Y., 1988). Mr. Weiss validated the statistical construct of
the Clusters by actually visiting neighborhoods assigned to each Cluster
throughout the United States.
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Claritas Cluster Applications to Direct Marketing

Mr. Robbin's cluster model was validated most effectively in
the area of direct response promotions where targeting effectiveness could
be quantitatively measured. Through selection of prospects in mailing lists
who resided in Claritas Clusters shown to be the most responsive by prior
analysis, subsequent mailings achieved significantly higher response rates
than earlier untargeted mailings. Marginal lists were turned into acceptable
promotional resources thereby, increasing both the mailable universe and
the profitability of mailing. Claritas Clusters also succeeded in maximizing
the profitability of many other diverse marketing actions. Applications
of the Claritas Clusters consistently achieved measurable benefits in market
targeting efficiency when applied to retail site location, optimization
of sales territories, localized analysis of market shares, launching of
new businesses, branch location, route delineations, merchandising strategy,
distribution and inventory allocations, fund raising and political campaigning.

Claritas Cluster Applications to Political Campaigning

In 1978, working with Matt Reese and Hamilton and Associates,
Mr. Robbin applied the Claritas Clusters for the first time in support
of a large-scale political action, the effort by a consortium of labor
unions in Missouri to defeat a "right to work" initiative on the ballot
that year. Indices were created by Cluster-profiling Hamilton's polls which
pinpointed in geodemographic terms the "leaning persuadables" (voters who
could be easily converted to the consortium's position). Cluster-profiling
the poll also identified the most effective message for positively influencing
each of nine mutually exclusive groups of voters with differing interests
and orientations towards the issue.

Over a half-million telephone calls, millions of mail pieces and direct
house to house canvassing actions were targeted to deliver the nine messages
to leaning favorable voters selected by analysis of geodemographic indices
at the block group level. Use of television was minimized so as not to
incite the opposition. This campaign turned a potential 40%/60% defeat
(as predicted by a July poll) into a 60%/40% victory at the polls in November.
Dubbed "the New Magic", the system has been frequently used by political
analysts since that time to target campaign, fund-raising and public relations
activities. It has been applied with particular effectiveness in guiding
communications designed to heighten public acceptance of a given point
of view on specific issues.

Contract with NIMH - the Mental Health Demographic Profile System

Among the larger projects managed by Mr. Robbin at Claritas
during the 1970's was a seven year contract with the National Institutes
of Mental Health of the federal government for the development and maintenance
of the "Mental Health Demographic Profile System." This system organized,
analyzed and retrieved small-area 1970 census data in the form of social
indicators for targeting services to the populations of Community Mental
Health Centers' catchment areas nationwide.
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Activities in the 1980's

Development of PRIZM

Under Mr. Robbin's direction, Claritas updated the Claritas
Neighborhood Lifestyle Cluster System based on the 1980 Census of
population and Housing and developed the PRIZM system (Potential
Ratings
in ZIP Markets) , a widely used, comprehensive marketing
data base which linked the forty 1980 U.S. Claritas Neighborhood Lifestyle
Cluster types to a broad range of databases containing consumers' sales
records or survey respondents identified by ZIP Code. These included:

customer information files with frequency, recency and amount of purchases,
print media circulation files,
magazine readership and consumer buying habits for many merchandise and
service items surveyed by syndicated research studies such as Mediamark
and Simmons,
TV, radio and cable broadcast ratings gathered by Scarborough, Birch, A.C.
Neilsen and Arbitron,
newspaper circulations and delivery areas,
R.L. Polk's new automobile registrations and
consumer behavioral and expenditure surveys and panels maintained by Market
Research Corporation of America, National Family Opinion and National Purchase
Diary.

COMPASS GIS

Claritas integrated these PRIZM-coded databases with
digital cartographic information, small-area census data and clients' transaction
files in a microcomputer software package, COMPASS, one of the first
GIS packages specifically developed to support geodemographic market targeting
applications.

Contract with U.S. Army Recruiting Command

Mr. Robbin was also Principal Investigator for Claritas' 1980
contract with the US Army Recruiting Command at Fort Sheridan, Illinois.
This extensive project supported General Maxwell R. Thurman's objectives
as commander of the Recruiting service to change the perception of the
Army as a job of last resort and target high-quality recruits capable of
managing challenging technological tasks in a modern fighting force.
For this purpose, Mr. Robbin designed custom geodemographic models explaining
and predicting success in recruitment of qualified soldiers able to handle
a variety of specific military occupational skills (MOS). These models
were then applied to the relocation, deployment and quota settings for
all recruiting stations throughout the United States, contributing to the
successful achievement of General Thurman's goals.
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Value-added Data Products

In addition to overseeing the development of statistical systems,
segmentation models and geodemographic applications, Mr. Robbin also directed
Claritas' activities in acquiring and adding value to new data bases and
updating, projecting, statistically reducing and enhancing the company's
principle data resources.

Some of the more widely adopted products and services invented and developed
by Mr. Robbin and offered by Claritas include:

P$YCLE, a dedicated geodemographic segmentation system for financial
service marketers based on a multivariate analysis of the 1986 Federal
Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finance and projected to the neighborhood
level using the 1980 census Public Use Microdata Sample and small-area
summary databases. This system determined the most powerful socioeconomic
predictors of consumer usage of financial products and services and employed
them to delineate and size twenty-three segments within each of the U.S.'s
250,000 block groups and enumeration districts as well as other small-area
geographies. P$YCLE was extensivly used by Chase Manhattan, Citicorp,
Chemical, First Interstate, American Express and a large number of other
significant entities in the banking and financial services sphere. A number
of these institutions have used P$YCLE to guide the reorganization
of their businesses from a "product" into a "personal" orientation.

WEALTHBASE, estimates of the distribution of households and persons
within small areas in intervals of very high assets and income. These estimates
were developed by models which capitalized interest and dividend income
data given by the census and greatly extended the Census Bureau's low open-ended
intervals (such as $50,000 and over) through extrapolation of least-squares
fitted Pareto curves. WEALTHBASE showed distributions of income
and financial assets cross-tabulated by age and work status for every neighborhood
in the United States. Brokers, bankers and merchandisers marketing to the
very affluent found this resource to be highly effective in concentrating
their efforts. A by-product of WEALTHBASE was an annual estimate
of the number of U.S. millionaires.

NIGHT/DAY, a database covering all metropolitan areas with significant
"commutersheds", or persons traveling outside their residential communities
on their journey to work. This resource calculated for small areas such
as census tracts and ZIP's, the distribution of PRIZM Clusters and
selected socioeconomic characteristics not only for area residents (nighttime
population) but also for the commuters from other neighborhoods, non-working
residents and residents who work where they live (daytime population).
Thus, for the first time in this application area, the persons patronizing
local establishments during the day could be targeted using a substantially
more accurate picture of market potential for neighborhoods impacted by
heavy incoming commuting.

AIM, the "AIDS Impact Model", a database at the small-area level resulting
from joint analysis of census data and local morbidity and mortality data
on AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome). At-risk populations were
estimated for 1,726 areas (PUMA's) tiling the United States using the 1980
census Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) and were then projected to small
areas by ecological inference, employing census summary tabulations (STF3B)
as marginals or bounds. These data were merged with morbidity and mortality
statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (HHS) and
rates of incidence of AIDS estimated thereby. An epidemiological
model specified by Dr. John Pickering of the University of Georgia, Athens
was evaluated which locally forecasted for health service providers and
life and health insurers HIV seropositives and AIDS cases and deaths annually
to the end of the century under varying assumptions regarding the length
of periods of incubation and progress of the illness from onset to death.

BUSINESS PATTERNS, applications of a special summary produced for Claritas
by the Census Bureau at the five-digit ZIP Code level of the data used
to develop "County Business Patterns". These data are summaries of administrative
statistics gathered from a universe of businesses withholding social security
contributions from employees. They include counts and payrolls of establishments
by size (number of employees) and by four-digit Standard Industrial Classification
codes for each ZIP. The primary models developed using such data were geodemographic
targeting of commercial ("business to business") marketing actions, estimation
of the volume of retail sales using the association of sales by merchandise
line with store type and size, and further evaluation of the characteristics
of working (daytime) populations in small areas.

Claritas/VNU currently provides a wide range of products and services
for direct, mass and retail marketers closely based on Mr. Robbin's original
models, which support local area targeting of sales and promotional actions
for a wide variety of commercial clients in almost every industry throughout
the world. A number of other "data vendor" firms have also made and
marketed simulacra of Mr. Robbin's and Claritas' systems with varying degrees
of competence.
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Activities in the 1990's

Since leaving Claritas in 1989, Mr. Robbin has independently
pursued a program of continued development of innovative and advanced marketing
information systems, services and value-added data resources, first at
Auricom Corporation and presently at his wholly owned company, Ricercar,
Inc..

Auricoms's Active Investors List

At Auricom, Mr. Robbin built the Active Investors List, a direct
marketing resource targeting the affluent market. He also directed Auricom
in its performance of ad hoc contracts for the building of custom market
targeting and segmentation models for a variety of national marketers and
financial service institutions.

Targeting the Affluent Market

At Ricercar, Mr. Robbin continues his specialty of targeting
the affluent market for a variety of high-end financial service clients.
He has recently developed a surprisingly effective method of identifying
names and addresses of individuals with significant assets residing in
compiled lists. He used this method in creating samples of respondents
who were interviewed to provide material for Dr. Thomas Stanley's best-selling
books: Ordinary Millionaires, The Millionaire Next Door and The
Millionaire Mind (forthcoming). The lists developed by Mr. Robbin for
Dr. Stanley provided a remarkable 80% concentration of qualified households
(millionaires in liquid assets) for inclusion in Stanley's studies of wealthy
Americans. Such households have an incidence of less than 2% in the general
population.

Ricercar's Contracts with the NCRI, Chesapeake

In a recent demonstration project Ricercar performed for the
National Centers for Resource Innovations (NCRI Chesapeake), Mr. Robbin
developed multivariate linkages of social and economic data to the agricultural,
environmental and physical characteristics of small rural areas. Factor
and cluster analysis were employed to reduce this integrated information
resource into a typology of small areas vividly reflecting a variety of
homogeneous categories of farm operations and operators. Ecological
inference was employed to estimate Concentrated Animal Operations for the
Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources, identifying small areas
where excessive generation of animal produced nutrients could be expected.

Mr. Robbin's rural clusters in a demonstration area encompassing the
Susquehanna watershed were joined to National Resource Inventory (NRI)
data measuring both environmental problems affecting agriculture and steps
farmers were taking to surmount them. These data were mapped and
analyzed in conjunction with the clusters to provide guidance to the United
States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and State of Pennsylvania environmental
protection agencies in local targeted marketing of conservation practices
to farmers in a variety of ecosystems.

In another project undertaken by NCRI, Chesapeake, Mr. Robbin used a
maximum likelihood ecological inference technique (iterative proportional
fitting) to distribute the data available in Table H16 of the STF3 1990
Census summary files (mode of housing unit sewage disposal) by occupancy
status (vacant/occupied), urbanization (urban/rural nonfarm/rural farm
residency) and household size (number of persons per household).
These estimates gave a population basis for NCRI's estimation of pounds
of nitrogen loadings emanating from septic and other non-sewered types
of waste disposal systems for each of the 12,388 census blockgroup small
areas throughout the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. The underlying interactions
of sewerage disposal with urbanization and household size as well as household
income, age of housing unit, plumbing, water source and number of units
in structure were determined by cross tabulation of the 5% Public Use Microdata
Sample of the 1990 Census within each of the 121 Public Use Microareas
in or intersecting the Watershed. Mr. Robbin's imputations permitted
an accurate assessment of the specific contribution of human nutrient to
nitogen loadings to ground water, surface water and the Chesapeake Bay.
After industrial waste disposal, the largest source of ground water contamination
is nitrates from septic field effluent.

Retail Site Location System for Goodwill Industries, International

Mr. Robbin has recently advanced the science of retail site
location and store performance evaluation by adapting Ricercar's proprietary
site location models to a comprehensive automated system which Ricercar
programmed for Goodwill Industries, International's (GII) central headquarters.
GII services 192 agencies and their 1,400 stores throughout the United
States. This system applies the results of empirical research to make a
model of nonlinear gravity effects which use the unique configurations
of population density and dispersion around a prospective store location
to specify a trading area radius encompassing 95% of shoppers. These gravity
gradients are then used to customize sales-adjustment factors based on
store selling space in square feet and distance (travel time) to store
of each consumer household in the trading area.

The absolute sales potential of each small neighborhood in the trading
area is determined by multivariate analysis of household demographic and
economic characteristics. Simultaneously, the system models the effects
of sales transfer to nearby existing stores and to competitors of varying
size offering the same merchandise and price lines. The effects of local
economic conditions are also considered in relation to store sales, including
comparative current area employment, income, inflation, cost of living
and retail sales. The system has proved highly accurate in forecasting
sales and in estimating both shopper volumes and dollar sales per shopper.
It is being used not only for evaluating specific prospective store sites
but also for determining the intrinsic potential of all alternative sites
in a large territory. This latter system use supports Mr. Robbin's strategic
concept of "proactive" siting. The proactive approach replaces the traditional
reactive method of waiting for sites to be proposed by realtors and then
running a specific evaluative study on them. Proactive siting enables retailers
to identify the most promising small areas in a territory and then to seek
appropriate properties located in these areas.

Management Profiling®

Mr. Robbin also has continued to innovate and launch new concepts
which
add value to large-scale public data resources through new uses of ecological
inference in the development of market targeting applications. In
particular, he has found ways to extend target marketing instrumentality
to small businesses through his proprietary system of "Management Profiling®"
which analyzes input from store managers to define market targets.

High Resolution Targeting®

Through an extensive analysis of microdata in the Census Bureau's
PUMS files, he has provided Ricercar with block-group level estimates of
numerous powerful new classifications of individuals and households into
multivariate categories not found in standard census tabulations and summary
files. Until the advent of this system, for example, it was impossible
to use census summary data for small areas to target double-earner, middle
and high income couples without children living at home and occupying a
variety of age brackets. Such important segments, at the heart of
many specific promotions (such as cruise packages), and many more custom-defined
and complex multidimensional groupings of consumers are now easily tracked,
mapped, and appended to prospect files at small-area levels. Ricercar
now offers a new service based on these concepts called "HRT®" (High
Resolution Targeting®). Clients with prior survey research or
transactional databases can now use these resources as input into their
custom definitions of high potential consumer market targets and, through
High Resolution Targeting®, locate concentrations of these special
prospects geographically and in geocoded mailing lists.
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Geoeconomics®

In searching to control more of the variance in the prediction
of sales penetration (the proportion of buyers to households in retail
territories or of responses to promotions in direct selling), Mr. Robbin
has isolated many powerful context variables exogenous to the traditionally
used demographic items. In particular, Mr. Robbin has discovered
that local variations at small area levels in cost of living, general prosperity
and consumer confidence create significant differences in selling success
versus a national average after primary demographic factors have been held
constant. Economists and federal-level makers of fiscal policy have traditionally
focused on macroeconomic indicators and their cyclical movements in highly
aggregated (national) form. Distracted by this, marketers inevitably have
tended to underestimate the intrinsic value of localized economic data.
This situation has led Mr. Robbin to develop a new set of Geoeconomic®
variables proprietary to Ricercar for use in supplementing the geodemographic
measures and systems now available to target marketers.

Geodemographic market targeting models are powerful predictors of that
part of consumption expenditure which is a consequence of life-style, social
status and demographic factors. But even persons of identical life-styles,
statuses and demographic characteristics who live in different places can
have dramatically different expectations of economic conditions and radically
different levels of discretionary expenditure based on the local value
of their money and the health of their local economies.

Ricercar's Geoeconomics® is a wholly new market targeting system
which measures on a current basis those economic aspects of small areas
which affect consumer spending. Fundamentally, Geoeconomic® measures
predict the varying propensity of consumers to purchase specific goods
and services in given small areas, segmenting them by shared household
and personal economic characteristics indexed to reflect local economic
conditions.

Mr. Robbin's new system of Geoeconomics® measures the income-driven
prerogatives of consumer spending and adjusts them to account for local
differences in the purchasing power of a dollar. Incomes, expenditures,
savings, investments, prices, credit balances and limits, taxes or discounts
are meaningfully compared place to place in Mr. Robbin's system by the
use of geographically constant "Geodollars®". Thus, the discretionary
spending capacity of households and its influence on sales statistics can
be computed in standard terms for local areas using Geodollars for the
purpose of making unbiased sorts or rankings of the value of marketing
opportunities in these local areas. Temporally constant dollars (i.e.,
current dollars adjusted by consumer price indices) are valuable for meaningful
comparison of economic trends over many years. Marketers, however,
typically are concerned only with the few months in which their promotions
take place. Cross-sectional geographic differences in the value of
money over their selling territory at the time of their activity are of
much greater relevance to their immediate success than lengthy secular
trends.

Another key element of Geoeconomics® is its current measurement
of local levels of prosperity and their very recent upward or downward
movements. Local boom or bust conditions mediate consumer confidence,
hence spending and other household economic behavior, no matter what the
socioeconomic spectrum. Geoeconomics® assesses these conditions in
real time at small-area levels.

In essence, the Geoeconomic® database which Mr. Robbin developed
for Ricercar groups consumers by their personal (household) financial characteristics
standardized to remove the effects of local differences in the cost of
living and then measures each segment's propensity to consume specific
goods and services considering the health of their local economy.

In direct marketing applications, Geoeconomic® measures are appended
to lists alone or as qualifiers of individual characteristics or geodemographic
types, improving their power to predict sales, hence to select the most
promising names.

Retail Sales Potential Analysis for Planning and Development with KCG

Since 1995, Mr. Robbin has developed proprietary estimates
at Ricercar of current retail sales by kind of business (SIC and NAICS)
at the ZIP code level in the United States and at the FSA level in Canada.
Utilizing these data and the results of running Ricercar's SELM®
system
(Site Evaluation and Location Model), Ricercar
has contributed to a number of large department store and shopping center
project planning and development studies performed by the Kissel Consulting
Group (KCG) for major developers and retailers.

Hyperanalysis®

At present, Mr. Robbin is also developing natural sequelae
to the automated analysis, interpretation and narrative report generation
systems he innovated in the 1960's which have been largely underutilized
or left unexploited by the purveyors, users and generators of public data.
Having renewed his development of the automated expert interpretation of
statistical tables and multivariate analyses and its translation into natural
language, he is embedding a new technology proprietary to Ricercar called
"Hyperanalysis®" in the online internet and intranet environment where,
hopefully, it will turn the losing battle against "statistical illiteracy"
into a winning one.
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Further Background

Consultations with Federal Agencies

Contemporaneously with Mr. Robbin's business career, he has
independently served the government on a number of occasions. In 1971,
he held an appointment as Expert Consultant in the Office of the Director,
Bureau of the Census, where he advised on development of new information
dissemination technologies and applications of multivariate statistical
models to small-area census data. Mr. Robbin was appointed by the Secretary
of Commerce to a two-year term on the Census Bureau Advisory Committee
on Small Areas beginning in 1974. He also served as the designated liaison
between the Census Bureau's Advisory Committee and the American Statistical
Association's Committee on Small-area Statistics. In 1980, he served the
Office of the Director, General Services Administration, as an expert consultant
evaluating the GSA's procurement and maintenance of data processing systems
in the light of new policies circularized by the Office of Management and
Budget.

Mr. Robbin gave expert testimony and guidance to the House
of Representatives' Government Information and Individual Rights Subcommittee
of the Committee on Government Operations during the hearing held September
17, 1980, Honorable Richardson Preyer presiding, regarding postal geography
and its potential for enhancing the uses, scope and value of census data
to both the private and public sectors during the debate on merits of establishing
the ZIP+4 system.

On a number of occasions from 2001 to the present, he has served the
Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Attorneys
in over a dozen states as an expert witness in applied statistics and retail
marketing. This work entailed the evaluation of traditional and nontraditional
patterns of distribution at retail of non-prescription drugs and the likelihood
of list 1 chemicals being sold over-the-counter in extraordinary quantities
by specific retail industry classifications such as convenience stores.
Through an analysis of the United States Economic Census of 1997 Merchandise
Line by NAICS code data along with statistics from commercial marketing
surveys and retail point-of-sale tracking systems, Mr. Robbin established
expected values for the average monthly sale of products containing pseudoephedrine
(hcl) by various types of retail outlets. Given evidence of extraordinarily
large quantities of such goods sold at wholesale to retailers normally
expected to deal in only minute amounts of them, he was able to establish
extrinsic proof that such acticvities constituted a "gray" market
through which precursor chemicals might be diverted to clandestine and
illicit manufacturers of a controlled substance, methamphetamine.
His analyses and testimony helped the government prevail in a number of
civil and criminal cases brought against wholesale distributors and retail
stores allegedly engaging in these practices.

In addition to his years on the faculty of New York University, Mr.
Robbin has taught numerous courses and lectured on statistical and scientific
data processing, research methodology for the social sciences and marketing
research, direct response modeling, political campaign targeting, demography,
human ecology, applied statistical analysis of aggregate data, small area
classification and cluster analysis, privacy issues in marketing, public
data access and use, value-adding to public data, retail site location
and store evaluation, sizing and targeting the affluent market and the
history of applied geodemography. He taught courses for several years
in applied statistics, research methodology and modeling for the American
Management Association and for the Nat Ross seminar series sponsored by
the Direct Marketing Advertising Association. In addition, he has served
as a guest lecturer on a number occasions at Georgetown University and
George Washington University explicating modern geodemographic concepts,
models and applications.

Publications

A bibliography
is
provided below listing Mr. Robbin's publications, presented papers and
non-proprietary research reports as well as references to books and
articles by others about his work.